1989 Therapeutic Frontiers Lecture Award, American College of Clinical Pharmacy

1987 NIH MERIT Award from NCI (1987-1995)

Research Interests

Research in the Evans lab is focused on the pharmacogenomics of anticancer agents, with an emphasis on childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) (reviewed in Evans and Relling, Nature 2004; Pui and Evans, NEJM 2006; Relling and Evans, Nature 2015). Several approaches are currently being used to identify genes and genome variations that are important determinants of the disposition and effects of antileukemic agents, including the use of genome wide approaches such as gene expression profiling (mRNA, microRNA) of leukemia cells, genome-wide SNP analyses (germline and somatic) and whole exome/genome sequencing of patient cohorts that have been uniformly treated and evaluated on prospective clinical trials at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (reviewed in Evans and Relling, Nature 2004), or by our collaborators in the COG and in Europe (eg, Princess Maxima Center, Utrecht). Ongoing studies are investigating genes that the lab has linked with resistance to antileukemic agents (Holleman et al, NEJM 2004; Lugthart et al, Cancer Cell 2005), and genes linked to the disposition (Kager et al, JCI 2005; Zaza, Blood 2005) or pharmacologic targets (Diouf et al, JAMA 2015; Paugh et al, Nat Genet 2015) of antileukemic agents as well as the influence of somatic and karyotypic abnormalities on genotype-phenotype concordance (Cheng, Nature Genetics 2005; Diouf et al, Nature Med 2011). Work in the lab is funded by a long-standing R01 from NCI (CA36401, W. Evans, PI), a project in the Center for Precision Medicine P50 Grant from NIGMS as part of the NIH-funded Pharmacogenetics Research Network (GM115279, M. Relling PI), by a Cancer Center Support grant from NCI (CA21765 S. Baker, PI), and by ALSAC, the fundraising organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The lab comprises a number of post-doctoral fellows, staff scientists, research technologists, bioinformaticists, computational scientists and students, working with collaborators at St. Jude (including Mary Relling, Ching-Hon Pui, Charles Mullighan, Hiroto Inaba, Kirsten Ness and Jun Yang as major collaborators, plus additional physicians, clinical pharmacists, research nurses and other staff at St. Jude), and with collaborators at other institutions in the US (HudsonAlpha, University of Chicago) and Europe (Erasmus University, Princess Maxima Center). The lab's overall goals are to elucidate genomic determinants of toxicity and efficacy of anticancer agents and translate this knowledge into new diagnostics and treatment strategies to optimize the therapy of ALL (Relling and Evans, Nature 2015; Dunnenberger et al, Ann Rev Pharmacol Tox 2015).